Many thanks to Rosemary Miller for her help on this paper. Epigraph taken from Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, 1986), 311.

1. Kristeva, Julia, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1994).Google Scholar For the seminal nature of Kristeva's work, see Honig, Bonnie, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neumann, Iver B., Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, 1999).Google Scholar

2. Kristeva, , quoted in Danielle Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement (Philadelphia, 1996), 195.Google Scholar

3. Kristeva asserts, “This is because, just as Lacan said the unconscious may perhaps be structured like a language, I think that it is above all structured as a carnage.” JuY\a Kristeva, , “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva,” Parallax 4, no. 3 (1998): 6.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

4. Kristeva, Julia, Crisis of the European Subject, trans. Susan, Fairfield (New York, 2000), 182.Google Scholar

5. Močnik, Rastko, “The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms,” in Bjelić, Dušan I. and Savić, Obrad, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 95.Google Scholar

6. Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994).Google Scholar

7. See also Neumann, Uses of the Other.

8. A harbinger of balkanism was Freud's letter to Trieste psychoanalyst Edoardo Weiss (28 May 1992) regarding Weiss's Slovene patient who was not responsive to therapy. Freud writes, “our analytical art when faced with such people, our perspicacity alone cannot break through to the dynamic relation which controls them.” Quoted in Žižek, Slavoj, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London, 1996), 8.Google ScholarPubMed Thus, Freud asserted the essence of the Balkans’ subjectivity precisely by declaring diem unreachable through the particular mythology of psychoanalysis.

9. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Goldsworthy, Vesna, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, 1998)Google Scholar; Gourgouris, Stathis, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996)Google Scholar; Bakic-Hayden, Milica, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917-31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Agoston-Nikolova, Elka, “The World Is Vast (Bulgarian Exile Writers between Two Cultures),” in Weststeijn, Willem G., ed., Dutch Contributions to the Twelfth International Congress ofSlavists (Amsterdam, 1999), 10.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 3; Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 167.

12. Gueorguieva, Elena, “Images de la Bulgarie dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Julia Kristeva,” Etudes balkaniques 2, no. 3 (2001): 215 Google Scholar. (Excerpts quoted here have been translated from the French by Rosemary Miller.) Gueorguieva's essay is useful in reminding us that, although Kristeva's work was first published in France in 1969, “it is only since 1992 that a first translation into Bulgarian saw the light…. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, interviews with Kristeva and the appearance of translations from extracts of her works have multiplied in the Bulgarian press. Other books have been translated lately into Bulgarian, notably The Old Man and the Wolves and Possessions, as well as an early work on psychoanalysis, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy…. Before that, only an elite group of Bulgarian intellectuals, those who knew foreign languages, had access to these works. Presently, through the translations, Kristeva is being revealed to readers of her country of origin, not only as a scholar of language, but also as a psychoanalyst and novelist” (215). Gueorguieva also points out that references to Bulgaria in Kristeva's novels “disguised, blended, juxtaposed to other elements of this world, the names of places” (221), may, in some cases, be recognizable only to Bulgarian readers.

13. “Rodolphe Jhering was, with these words, the first to approximate the figure of homo sacer to that of the xvargas, the wolf-man, and of the Friedlos, the ‘man without peace' of ancient Germanic law.” Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, 1998), 104 Google Scholar.

14. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982), 1.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., 3. Emphasis in the original.

16. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 176.

17. Julia Kristeva, “La Langue, la nation, les femmes” (speech presented at University of Sofia, 2002). (Excerpts quoted in this article have been translated from the French by Rosemary Miller.) Dimitar Kambourov, who was present when Kristeva received the Doctor Honoris Causa degree and heard her speak, sent me a copy of her speech in the original French. He reports, “I would say that people who know details concerning Kristeva's intellectual itinerary would not be that surprised by the fact that she gave her speech in French … in fact, there was widespread opposition to what she did then.” Kambourov, letter to author, 19 March 2007. Quoted by permission.

18. Ibid., 12-13.

19. Kristeva, Julia, “Bulgarie, ma souffrance,” L'Infini 51 (Autumn 1995): 42-52Google Scholar. Translated as “Bulgaria, My Suffering,” Crisis of the European Subject, 163-83.

20. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 171.

21. Ibid., 57.

22. Kristeva, Julia, Revolt, She Said, trans. O'Keeffe, Brian, ed. Sylvére Lotringer (Los Angeles, 2002), 49.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 65.

24. For an analysis of “inter-esse,” see Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 11, 52, 54.

25. Kristeva, , Intimate Revolt, trans. Herman, Jeanine (New York, 2002), 243.Google Scholar

26. “Aller retour” in Tzvetan Todorov, L'Homme dépaysé (Paris, 1996), 11-26. (Excerpts quoted in this article have been translated from the French by Rosemary Miller.)

27. Todorov's essay makes clear just how cut off he (and doubtless Kristeva as well) were from Bulgaria after leaving there in the 1960s. He writes, “The circumstances were thus: the length of my absence; the completeness of the rupture during those years …; news traveled with difficulty between Sofia and Paris, hindered by the iron curtain; and the disconnectedness between those two places was actually greater than between Paris and San Francisco.” Ibid., 13.

28. Ibid., 21.

29. Kambourov adds, “On the other hand, we are so deeply disappointed by the way this culture has developed along the recent two decades that our lamentations and deploring attitudes sometimes go way further.” Kambourov, letter to author, 19 March 2007. Quoted with permission.

30. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Outside in the Teaching Machine (London, 1993), 17 Google Scholar.

31. Penney, James, “Uncanny Foreigners: Does the Subaltern Speak through Julia Kristeva?” in Lane, Christopher, ed., The Psychoanalysis of Race (New York, 1998), 126, 133.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., 133.

33. Nikolchina, Miglena, Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Wool/ (New York, 2004), 60.Google Scholar

34. Ibid.

35. Kristeva, Powers of Horror; Kristeva, Julia, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Waller, Margaret (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

36. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language.

37. Kristeva, Julia, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Herman, Jeanine (New York, 2000), 68.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., 245.

39. Kristeva, Julia, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Guberman, Ross (New York, 1995), 204.Google Scholar

40. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 260.

41. Ibid., 245.

42. Sara Beardsworth./w/M Kristeva: Psychonalysis and Modernity (Albany, 2004), 189.

43. Samir Dayal, “Introduction,” in Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 41.

44. Kristeva, Julia, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, Toril (New York, 1986), 310, 11.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., 314.

46. Ibid., 309. Emphasis in the original.

47. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 176.

48. Yet she praises her father Stoyan Kristev, “the orthodox intellectual who pushed byzantinism, up to the point of making me learn French from a very early age, in order to transmit to me the spirit of inquiry and freedom with which French culture is endowed.“ Kristeva, “La Langue, la nation, les femmes,” 3.

49. Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 38-39.

50. The believer is thus “caught in an exquisite logic of submission and exaltation that offers him the joys and sorrows intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic and, on a more personal level, to male homosexuality.” Ibid., 139.

51. Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 21.

52. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 214.

53. Ibid.

54. Kristeva, Julia, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1993), 69.Google Scholar

55. Ibid., 75.

56. Ibid., 54.

57. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 46.

58. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.

59. Here I refer to Bakic-Hayden's notion of “nesting orientalisms” as specific selfcolonizing discursive processes according to which the Balkan subjects internalize the east-west geopolitical split and then act upon each other in terms of these schemas. Bakic- Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms.“

60. Ugo Vlaisavljević, “South Slav Identity and the Ultimate War-Reality,” in Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds., Balkan as Metaphor: Behueen Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 191-207.

61. Kristeva, “La Langue, la nation, les femmes,” 4.

62. And, John Mowitt reminds us, despite her dedication to psychoanalysis as the “talking cure” for today's “maladies of the soul,” she excludes from this form of Oedipal redemption, the entire population of Arabic-speaking immigrants whose language she, the therapist, does not speak. John Mowitt, “Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure,” Parallax A, no. 3 (1998): 56.

63. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 106.

64. Brickman, Celia, Aboriginal Populations in the Mind: Race and Primitivity in Psychoanalysis (New York, 2003), 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65. Ibid.

66. M. Pierette Malcuzynski specifically refutes the heterogeneity, in the Bakhtinian sense, of Kristeva's work: “A Bakhtinian understanding of heterogeneity should also be distinguished from Julia Kristeva's discussion of the ‘heterogeneous.’ She postulates a (neo)Freudian interpretation of the subject's revolutionary struggle, whereby the subject's discourse should be heard together with the ‘heterogeneous contradiction’ suspended by the Marxist subject…. In my view, Kristeva operates a Freudo-Marxist syncretism which, still grounded in Freud's instinct or drive theory (Trieb) yet again presupposes a hierarchy with an all-powerful producing subject ruling its originating summit, a subject which calls itself T (moi). This particular representation of the ‘heterogeneous’ problem has little to do with the constitutive heterogeneity referred to in Bakhtin's writing by means of the polyphonic: a practice of dehierarchization where the producing subject is itself understood as the product of dialogized instances with other socio-cultural subjects.“ M. Pierrette Malcuzynski, “Mikhail Bakhtin and the Sociocritical Practice,” in Robert F. Barsky and Michael Holquist, eds., Bakhtin and Otherness, special issue of Social Discourse- Research Papers in Comparative Literature, vol. 3, nos. 1-2 (1990): 89.

67. Kristeva, “La Langue, la nation, les femmes,” 8-9.

68. Todorov is the author of a text widely viewed as the definitive work on Bakhtin: Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis, 1984).

69. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Morals of History, trans. Waters, Alyson (Minneapolis, 1995), 4.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original.

70. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

71. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 243.

72. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 79

73. Ibid., 79.

74. Kristeva articulates this borderless application of psychoanalysis as follows: “Beyond the uncertainties and perversities of analytical institutions, psychoanalysis seems to me to be the lay version, and the only one, of this search for the truth of the speaking being which, from another point of view, is symbolized by religion for certain of my friends and contemporaries. My own prejudice is believing that God is analyzable infinitely.“Julia Kristeva, “Memoire,” LInfini 1 (Winter 1983): 45.